


Faces In The Graves

by thepizzaman



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kid Fic, M/M, Neglect, Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Tarsus IV, basically Jim is a kid when everyone goes to the academy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2018-11-05 20:35:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11021100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepizzaman/pseuds/thepizzaman
Summary: “Don’t hold your breath waiting for me.” Jim tells the women who stands in the kitchen, the women he once knew, and in a life that now seams to far away it might as well have been a dream. He stands in the doorway with two feet on her and a backpack slung over his bruised shoulders and a look in his eyes so tired he might as well already be dead. He stands in the doorway, the ghost of his father, and tells his mother; “I may never come home.”--In which Jim is a teenager with an attitude and terrible nightmares, and Bones is just too nice for his own good.*rewritten with beta





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> this entire fic came from me listen to 99 by elliot moss on repeat for three days and getting depressed-drunk and fighting a person dressed like a pirate in a dennys parking lot at 12;30 in afternoon because i really feel like that's the Jim Kirk aesthetic of the 21st century   
> yall think im kidding
> 
> don't be fooled though this fic will still be depressing as fuck lmao lets get to it
> 
> also pls heed the warnings in the tags

 

  The moment Jim steps out of his house that morning he’s already running, he looks over the Iowa horizon and the gentle colors of red and orange, blue, purple, and everything that would normally constitute an ugly bruise, and he knows he won’t see it again. Silhouetted against the innocent sunrise is his brother: carrying nothing but the clothes off his back and the fire in his heart.

Jim runs after him, putting everything he’s ever loved into the footsteps that carry him to his older brother - the only thing keeping their blood a family. He reaches out to pull Sam’s shoulder back and the older boy snaps at him like a wild beast, snaps like he’s only ever seen him snap at Frank. Something akin to horror fills Jim’s veins at that thought, that he may become the very man he fears and hates the most, or that he may already be him.

Sam screams at him.

“Don’t ask me to stay!” he yells, his voice like a lion’s roar, “I can’t live in this house anymore, Jim. I can’t be a Kirk in that house.”

Jim doesn’t know what that means, to ‘be a Kirk’. Is he supposed to be a hero? Is he supposed to kill himself to save his family, to leave them, abandon them and let them suffer in absence? Sam never told his estranged brother what that was supposed to mean, what his father was. He just left Jim standing there on their front lawn, surrounded by miles of nothing in every direction, with disappointment at his back and an empty life in front of him.

Jim panics, because when he asks Sam to take him with, he yells again with no remorse in his eyes or love in the hands that shove him backwards.

“you’re the reason I’m leaving.”

He’s the reason Sam is leaving. He’s the reason his father had to die instead of coming home with them, he’s the reason his mother married Frank, he’s the reason Frank is always so drunk and angry, he’s the reason his mother can’t look either of her children in the eyes anymore, he’s the reason Frank and Sam fought so much. Something clicks in him at that exact moment, and he panics. His father went out with a silent bang, disappearing into the black with nothing but a whisper. So he takes Franks old car, and he leaves behind the sound of his dry heaves as he cries to hard he thinks he might die.

When the cliff gets closer and closer, he screams. Jim screams just in case the universe has forgotten about him like so many have. He doesn’t know why he jumps out of the car at the last second, but he does know that the high he feels of being that close to death will never, ever, leave him. When the officer asks him what his name is, he decides then and there that this is what it means to be a Kirk. It means to be Jim, to be whoever he will be. He will redefine what it means to be a Kirk, he’ll do it so loudly that everyone will know his name by his face, not the other way around.

But then, he’s on Tarsus, and that place he thought he had as a new home is burning in front of his eyes. The porch where he and his grandfather sat to watch over their genetically grown crops while Jim’s father’s father rambles on about fishing and farming - in the background his grandmother tries to teach him how to knit; is on fire. Now, it’s all fire. The Kirk farm is the first to go, and the closest thing he has to a father figure burns with it. There’s blood in Jim’s eyes mixing with tears and dirt and suddenly it doesn’t matter to own his name. Suddenly owning his name is dangerous, and if he wanted to survive this he had to let his old self go, as if he even knew who he was before all this.

Jim rids himself of the name on that day. The day that he drags himself and five other children who have never known fear out of a clearing crowded by phaser fire, and the screams of the dead - their families - and dying - their friends. The rotting bodies of the, ‘sacrifices made to best the colony’, pilled on funeral piers that smell like hell itself and buried in ditches to remind them all of just how powerless they were in Kodos’ clutches. Jim makes them run until their feet bleed then they keep going, and in those long hours of fleeing he becomes JT, and every drop of blood left in his veins beats for a heart filled with thoughts of nothing but revenge.

“Survive.” Is what he tells Thomas the day he tells JT he can’t walk anymore, that he just wants to die. Jim thinks of his brother, and wherever he may be in the universe, and he wants Sam to see Jim stoop down into the ashes of their lives and pull his friend off the ground and carry him for three miles where he could have left him to die.

They hide in an old dilithium mine, and Erica tells JT that if the federation gets word that there’s dilithium on the planet no lie Kodos can say to them will keep them from coming. They’ll have to come check on the colony, have to face reality, have to stand for their mistakes. Erica points this out between stints of running from search lights and raiding food storage facilities filled with enough produce to support the colony and it’s 4,000 dead inhabitants that still lay in the town square where they were executed. Jim would never admit the pleasure he gets from hiding in trees, wearing torn black rags to cover his face as he swoops down and cuts the throats of those colonists who turned for Kodos and helped him become a murderer. Erica stays behind one day and almost gets herself and JT killed because she’s wanted to paint ‘All hail Kodos, the executioner’ on the side of the food supply building. Erica really is the revolutionist, and from then on, the survivors call them The Children’s Revolution. The survivors who fair themselves rebels begin to call Kodos the ‘Executioner’ behind his back.

So, they make a plan. They talk about the dilithium, and the limited access to technology they have to code a message to some Starfleet officer; JT of course is a huge fan of the dramatics and decides that if they really are going to do this, they are going to go all out. The few of them left decide to sneak into the governors’ office and send a coded message to Starfleet, under the guise of being a simple PADD message to one first officer named Christopher Pike that is a cry for help. JT alters the plan to his own liking, mostly because he doesn’t want the other kids to lose faith in their federation while JT knows at this point it won’t be that easy. He chooses Christopher while fishing through the crew database on the closest Starfleet vessel to the colony, Jim looked at him for a moment and thinks his eyes remind him of his brothers.

Erica helps them get inside, and Thomas helps them out, but JT doesn’t make it out of the building, and he doesn’t seem too bothered by that fact. He sits in the governor’s chair with the blood of his fellow colonists bathing his hands and face, and he smiles into the camera as he gently informs Starfleet that the devil walks like a man and speaks like a leader and that JT has seen him with his own two eyes.

JT doesn’t see Erica get shot down in a cornfield only minutes later while running from Kodos’s men. He doesn’t see her push Thomas and Kevin on past the edge of the mud and dirt and blood, doesn’t see the two limp back to their hiding spot where they slowly begin to die from the weight of it all.

Pike sees the message late after a long shift, and he’s not yet old or a fool enough to not notice an encrypted message. He opens the file hidden under code he’s never seen before – for the record, it takes him and the ship computer an hour to decode it - that contains a three-minuet long video of a beaten, emancipated child smiling in front of a tiny camera telling of atrocities Christopher thought humanity left behind in the 20th century. He listens to the young boy tell him that if Kodos knows they’re coming everyone will die, he listens to the child tell him that they need to come to the dilithium mines hidden about 20 miles away from the settlement and come into the colony while Kodos sleeps. He listens to this elaborate and extremely well thought military plan coming spilling out of the mouth of a boy. He also watches as someone barges into the room and beats the child until he can’t move, and the video cuts out.

Pike runs through the decks of the ship faster than he’s ever run before, there’s vomit burning in his gut as tells his captain the message he received from the Tarsus IV colony that went dark a couple weeks ago. Pike has never felt anger the way he feels it now, never felt the second-hand loss of all the lives in torment on that now godforsaken planet.

The week that passes between the rescue and the message being sent is the longest that Pike has ever experienced. He can’t count the number of times he’s woken up screaming in the middle of the night thinking of the boy in the video, whether he was another casualty of war or whether he’s suffering, waiting for them to come save him. He runs to his captain every time and begs him to take action, to screw Starfleet and do what’s right, not what they command of him. The military arrives that day, a bunch of black-clad figures ready to fight like hell. Almost every single one of them approaches Pike during the hour-long flight to the planet about how moved they were by his call to action made in front of the federation admirals, that all their eyes had been stained by the contents of the hidden video as well. It doesn’t make him feel any better.

What does make him feel better is when, later that night, after rescuing four near-dead children hiding in an old cave, he and the other soldiers are treading through the mud and dirt mowing down those traitors who helped the governor turn a peaceful, fresh colony into a killing ground. It makes him feel better once they start shooting, and they storm the town hall building and someone shoot’s Kodos in the face. In the moment, he would have found even more satisfaction in seeing the man’s dead body but as soon as they enter his office the only thing on his mind in the boy.

“Pike, I know you don’t want to hear this.” Someone says over his shoulder, “but the boy is probably dead, let’s get the living to safety.”

“Where’s the body, then?” he growls, mostly to himself as the world starts to spin.

“There are bodies everywhere, Christopher.” His captain is at his side with a gentle hand on his underlings’ shoulder and grief mingling with tears in his eyes.

Pike won’t take that as an answer, and he sits in the same chair the boy sat in as he cried for their help and forever burned the imagine of his blood covered face and his dead eyes into the back of Pike’s mind. He swivels the chair around, facing the area of the room covered by a dirty area rug and a couple of chairs that look far too comfortable to be in such a horrid place. He notices the absence of dust surrounding the area rug, and how one corner is turned up in frantic disarray.

They pull back the rug and the first thing that hit’s them is the smell. The smell of flesh, dirt and blood reeks from every corner of this town, but here it congregates as if it was the source of all other foul stenches. Christopher and his captain yank open a hidden plank door under the rug and Pike’s eye’s start to water and he has to bring his hand up to cover his mouth to stop from vomiting. A ladder extends from the door and everyone goes quiet. Not a soul in the room wants to plague their existence with whatever awaits them in this pit of horrors. Christopher knows, however, that if he chooses to ignore it, it will be much worse a burden to bare then venturing down and facing whatever it is the universe has chosen for his eye’s to be stained with.

Without a word, he begins the descent, and he holds his breath. There’s a body slumped in the corner, and he approaches it expecting it to be dead. It’s sitting up, eyes closed, sitting in a pool of its own piss and blood, and its barely even skin and bones. He kneels down in front of it and reaches out to find a pulse but before he can its’ eyes snap open. They’re still half lidded, and they don’t look at Christopher but through him. His stomach drops: it’s the boy from the video

There’s a silence, and then it speaks, voice coarse like sand. “let me die.”

“I’m sorry.” Is all Christopher thinks to say, and he knows it was probably the wrong thing to say in that moment – or perhaps is wasn’t – because the kid starts to cry, silently, like an early morning spring rain.

The lights from the emergency shuttles that come from above to take them are so blinding that when JT manages to peal his eyelids open he can’t help but think of the search lights that bit at their heels for so long and he thinks he’s been caught. He starts to scream, and squirm in Christopher’s arms and when he manages to fight his way to the muddy ground and his face makes contact with the dirt he just wants to die so bad that he stops caring and lets them take him away.

 

\--

 

Several weeks later when he’s standing behind a podium on the biggest naval vessel in Starfleet facing judges as the only accountable witness of the crimes committed, they tell him that he’s almost 16 years old and he starts to cry, and they call for recess.

the next time they meet there’s a new fire in his eyes, because he looks over all these prestige judges and admirals and the fear in their eyes at the thought of Starfleet’s record being slandered by this slip up to max out all slip ups. The failure to follow up on the progress of such a risky colony and the fact they let themselves be manipulated by Kodos’s fake reports of abundance and who exactly is to blame is a burden that weighs heavy on everybody’s shoulders, including Jim’s.

So, he strikes up a deal with the ever-so-moral federation admirals that they can do whatever they want with the information he discloses to them – and he will tell them everything – if they erase his name from the database of victims and replace it with the cryptic ‘JT’. They shake hands, and Jim’s lawyer is standing behind him looking dumbfounded. As Jim leaves the courtroom he leaves it alone, through a crowd of medical staff and solders recognizable by the haunted look in their faces, he makes eye contact with a young nurse angrily stomping behind a gurney with pity and remorse etched into the lines of his scowl. Jim flashes the man a smile, and he offers nothing but a cold stare in return. He watches the kid, in the center of bodyguards and captains, being swept onto a shuttle and disappearing into the cold void of space.

When Jim gets home he’s standing on his front porch and he’s watching the sunset. A brilliant explosion of purple, blue, orange, red, and pink, colors he would never think to call beautiful again. He can’t help but feel guilty, because the only thing on his mind is how many eyes will never be graced with the sight of a beautiful sunset again. Jim can’t not think of Erica, and how she died with eyes pointing to grey night skies raining strings down on her dying body – or all the people in the square the day that it all started whose final sights where of their fellow neighbors and coworkers, friend and family, dying bloody and merciless deaths like cows for slaughter. Something is wrong with Jim standing here, he can feel it in his gut; he should have died on Tarsus. He didn’t, for one reason or another, and he’s fucked with fate.

 


	2. Wishes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His eyes had a smooth blankness to them, as though all Jim was had left his mind and body. He couldn't know where he was going, like grief, his feet tripping over each other. Only one thought had stayed that was in any way tangible was that he needed air, needed air, he couldn't breath he just...needed air. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this seems a little dry I wrote the second half after not sleeping for 48 hours and having a fever dream about dying in the desert yall think my inspiration is a joke 
> 
> It’s kinda short 
> 
> Warnings for this one: it was hard for me to write because of a scene involving a panic attack I actually had to stop and take a walk lmao im sorry I’m like this 
> 
> A lot of this is a way I vent from my own experiences but I hope you guys enjoy it nonetheless. I got into film school because of an essay I wrote about Star Trek so I’ve been reinvigorated 
> 
> Enjoy!

 

  His mother does not stay long. Jim doesn't blame her for it - she wants to talk, wants to hear Jim cry and tell her that he needs her, but Jim can't. Even if he wanted to he couldn't. There are some things, for him, that are so painful all they become are ghosts of memories. His brain decided it could no longer hold in what it was holding and simply had to let it go. He and JT forgot each other just as quickly as they became each other; JT became a name on a long list of names of the dead, and Jim wanted it that way because a part of him wishes he could be amongst those rotting bones piled in that courtyard so all this that causes pain unlike anything he has known before could stop. It is like, rather than dying, the universe has caught him in limbo between life and whatever happens next and is holding him there. He curses the universe, but his interesting nature compels him to see it as an opportunity. An opportunity very few are ever granted: the chance to restart his life from scratch. 

He is sitting on the front porch smoking a cigarette he stole from his mother watching the sun rise, and it is a gift to watch the colors of the sky change from an inky blackness to a blue with frills of pink and purple, a red glare falling over the endless sea of farmland turning them into amber fields swaying in the desert wind. There's a club a few miles down the road that stands out amongst the vast nothing and the factories like a beacon of something more. It's the only place Jim enjoys going, not because he likes getting tossed around by the older men or the angry factory workers and the star fleet academics that use the place like a spawn point for bad decisions with no consequences. It just has a certain ambience to it that feels kindred to his aching spirit; it feels like stagnate summer air, feels like he's leaving it all behind and moving on, feels like he's alive again. All he does is sit in the parking lot and smoke. He only goes really early when in the morning when no one is there or right at sunset and waits to watch people come and go throughout the night. 

Sometimes people, mostly couples or women, try to give him their nearly empty credit chips with only a bus fair or a few shots worth of credits left on them. Of course, Jim scoffs at them and gives them a very conservative 'are you fucking with me' side glance, but of course he usually takes the money and saves it. For what, he is not yet sure, but he can feel that it will be important. He takes the chips and puts them under his mattress back at the farm house, next to journals and pictures from Tarsus he had printed. Pictures of things when things were still good. 

His mom picked him up from the space station and she was drunk, but only a little. There was something in the way she stood, hunched like she had aged fifty years in the one that Jim was away. The words between her and her son float heavily on her shoulders. She promised him that moving to Tarsus with his father’s father would help him recover the memory of his own lost father. She said it would make things better, make him better. She fell to her knees and looked up at her boy with tears bubbling over and watering her cheeks. She begs his forgiveness and Jim forgets everything in that moment. 

At night, they cook dinner in silence and they eat it while Winona tries to make Jim feel at home again. She tip-toes around him. At night, he can still feel Kodos's hands on him. After a few months, his mother goes back into space; she can't handle the silence and Jim won't give her the validation she craves, the forgiveness, or perhaps she just wanted Jim to cry so she didn't have to. The only strength she has left she puts towards fleeing her son, and her home. 

\--

Jim doesn't really like going into town anymore unless he has to. He already didn't like going into the downtown of riverside, he preferred the farms, because the shop owners and the day-goers all knew his father, as they always do, and have some form of condolences to hand to him or his poor, poor mother. He hates that. They never really think about him, they just think about his father - what a hero he was, and what a loss he is. They never ask about him, or about his mother, or about how his father’s crops died long ago, and the grain and corn fields are just skeletons of what they used to be because no one in his house cares enough about life anymore. But he has to go into town to get groceries for his mom, when she visits. Frank moved out when he was off-planet, and god does Jim wish he could have been there to see what the store clerk described as the fight of the century. His mother only ever has courage when Jim isn't around, but he tries not to think about it as the excited women in front of him explains in wild detail how Winona had flung Frank from her house and driven him into to town to drag the bastard through the streets by his ears, so the entire town could watch her whip him like the dog he was. Jim wishes he knew what drove her to it; no one has seen him since the Kirk drove him out of town. The store clerk says this all behind eyes lit with fury as she bags the milk, eggs, bread, and microwave dinners Jim buys. She tells him how lucky he is to have such a powerful mother, and Jim breaths in the Iowa dust wishing he actually did. His mother is sad, broken but Winona Kirk is a force to challenge the sun. 

After coming home, he sits on the garage roof and waits for Sam to come home from school. He doesn't. Jim never sees his older brother again. 

The time for Starfleet recruitment rolls around and this time Jim is turning 18. Propaganda posters line the alley ways in town and big signs illuminate the night on the side of the highways. His old enough to enlists in all technicalities, at least for the academy, but the thought of following in his father’s footsteps is one breath too close to creating a legacy. Instead of doing something noble on his birthday, he buys a pair of new shoes, a packet of filter cigarettes, and goes inside the club for the first time. The bouncer takes his ID and puts huge black X's over the tops of his hands so he can't drink. He has more fun in that night than he has had in a while, perhaps ever. he doesn't stay as long as he wishes he could, because he meets a really nice guy around his same age both attracted to each other by the mutual mark on their hands assigning them to sobriety, and the guy is so nice, and he dances with him, but the lights and the smoke becomes too much, and he gets light headed and throws up in the women's bathroom. A few older men buy him drinks, a few older women try to corral him into their groups, try to protect him. The other kid takes him outside and they sit in the middle of the parking lot until the bar lets out talking about who they are. The kid talks more than Jim does, with a thick accent Jim can't put his finger on, he talks about space and the brightness of the stars and the glee of the future. Jim wishes he could be there with that kid, but his mind soars into the night sky and he just sees pain, the dimming dying lights that will, like earth, blow out like a candle with no qualms about aspirations of two boys laying in the parking lot of a club in Iowa. He wants to know there is a future for himself. The world goes on despite his tragedy, He just watches it all go on around him and is far too tired to do anything about it. 

Jim tries to light a cigarette on his walk home, but as he does he finds he loses interest in the stupid little sticks. They are less appealing to him when they aren’t stolen.

The next day his mom comes home. She's been on missions for a long time, going on and off planet while Jim takes care of the farm house and pretends like he's waiting for her. He comes in from a hot day working in their neighbors’ grain fields for some petty cash and his mom is standing in the kitchen, Starfleet uniform hanging off her thin frame. There's a deep look in her eyes that would mimic the dead, and her hair is falling out of the messy bun hanging off the top of her head. Sitting in front of her on the table are the credit chips, and her journals both from Tarsus and from after, and all the pictures splayed out in front of her distraught face. The first emotion that hits Jim is betrayal. 

"Jimmy." She hums, and she's drunk. "My baby." 

Jim stands in the doorway and puffs out his chest as she stumbles closer to him. Her shape looks too much like franks, her eyes too much like death. All Jim’s body allows him to do is stand there, towering over his mother even at eighteen, and let her slink closer and closer until she's leaning up against his chest and digging her claws into his back. She's not crying yet but her entire form is quaking.

Jim let's out a yell and his knees buckle. They both fall to the floor and his mom is crying into his shirt and he doesn't know why. 

"Oh, my boy." She whispers under hitched breathing, digging her face into Jim's shoulder. "Oh, my boy is home." 

Jim tries to get her off, but she won't let go. She won't let go, she won't let go. He feels their eyes watching him, their eyes the dead and the dying watching him from around the corners of his house and his mother’s finger are digging into a scar on his back and he can feel the skin folding and he watches Erica die alone in a corn field and he never knows if Kevin wakes up from the coma and god damn it why did he come home. Why did he leave them? He promised them he would never leave them. 

He panics. Back on that space station he let his mother do this to him, let her coddle him because she needed it more than he did, and he just needed to take care of someone. But within a few months she was gone again and now - now she hasn't been seen in a year and Jim can't handle it anymore. He begins to squirm and he can't remember where he is. He struggles to get away from his mother and he falls backwards down the patio steps onto the front walkway. His mother wails like an infant behind him, putting all her soul into the shrieks that rip unnaturally from her throat in waves. He tumbles onto the front lawn and grabs the bag of extra clothes he brought to the farm, barely able to stand up straight as this unexplainable terror hits him in the chest over and over again, his heart like a hammer beating so violently it sends him reeling. He falls a few times, spilling onto the dust on the road. He started to walk, blindly, while the wind whipped his fragile frame about and his mother continued to scream at him from the house. His eyes had a smooth blankness to them, as though all Jim was had left his mind and body. He couldn't know where he was going, like grief, his feet tripping over each other. Only one thought had stayed that was in any way tangible was that he needed air, needed air, he couldn't breathe he just...needed air. 

He kept walking, his mom came out to the edge of the front yard gripping to the picket fence and called his name but she never went past the fence. She didn't come after him, but Jim took her heart with him when he left, whether he knew it or not. He kept walking, miles until he reached the club. He goes inside and sits at the bar, not drinking not speaking not blinking staring at the giant X's over his hands. The lights and the smoke and the laughing and the music stay with him, his panicked heart and the sound beat together.

When the bar lets out he gets picked up by a man who's been eyeing him all night. The guy is tall, he's got a deep and slow voice that talks to Jim like a river of silk carrying his body along. He walks with him to the door and pulls keys out of his leather jacket pocket. Jim stops in the parking lot and looks towards the back side of the club, where he was planning on sleeping the night. The man stops too, Jim gets a good look at him: he's got innocent eyes, must be only a few years older than Jim, tall and slim, shy. 

"I've got a flat downtown." He says, "I don't know if you have somewhere to be tonight but - " 

"No." Jim says back, surprised at how steady his voice is. "I don't." 

The guy has a motorcycle, and Jim rides on the back of it for the first time and thinks it's possibly the closest a person can get to flying. He and The man go to his apartment, they have a few drinks and Jim spills his heart and soul. He cries for the first time since he's gotten home from Tarsus, since he lost his father, since he lost his brother, since he abandoned his mother. He cries to deeply and violently it hurts, and his mind cannot even process his tears, barely even able to tell the cry is happening - it just all comes barreling out of him at once, like a spring rain after a dry winter. The man sits and listen patiently to it all, his eyes don't leave Jim once. Eventually Jim's body slumps up onto the couch and he falls into a dreamless post-cry coma. Peter falls asleep on the chair opposite him. 

Jim wakes up at the crack of dawn, shooting up at the unfamiliar surroundings, he almost shouts but his eyes scan over the other man in the room, still snoring with his arms crossed and head lolled on his shoulder. Jim takes a few deep breaths and begins to gather himself. He sneaks around the apartment retrieving water and using the bathroom all while the man still snores up a storm in the living room. Jim is about to make a dash for the door when he spots the motorcycle keys sitting on a shelf by a window and he makes a decision that kicks off a series of choices which spark a change in his body. He decides that if his father can disappear, if his mother can, if his brother can, then he'll be damned if he just ends up being the last one left standing, be the one everyone abandons. 

He steals the motorcycle, and a leather jacket that smells like real cologne and whiskey, and just a little like fish. Jim likes the aesthetic and he's a cursed man to revel in the looks and the murmurs that ripple through the crowds that shuffle around the loading docks at the shuttle station - he feels taller. One of the men even compliments the bike and the look he hands him gives Jim what he supposes is a superiority complex. 

Jim shuffles into the shuttle filled with several Starfleet cadets all sending judgmental stares his way, and even those make him feel better. The air in the company of these people is far different from anything he's felt before. None of them care for him, none know who is his, and he the same for them. It is liberating. 

The greater in front of the shuttle warns him about a low hanging bar but his still a teenager so he's short enough that he passes right under it, while other loading behind him duck and one bulky cadet with an entourage bangs his forehead in and makes Jim giggle. He goes and sits down far away from anyone wearing a Starfleet uniform. As he sits someone begins yelling, something about being a doctor, a few curse words flung between him a very short Starfleet officer. The two tango over to where Jim is sitting, the officer pushing him to his seat. The man looks old, too old, and the slouch in his shoulder and crazed look in his eyes scream of a drunkard. 

"Sit down sir, or I'll make you sit down!" The officer shouts, and that shuts the man up quick. 

He takes a seat at his wide shoulders slam into Jim's. He starts talking but Jim isn't sure he's actually talking to him at first, rambling on about death and darkness and the horrors of space. His shuffling uncomfortably, mumbling under his breath, glaring at anyone brave enough to approach him; he's perfect. 

“You know I think these things are pretty safe.” Jim offered, and the man seemed all the angrier.

“Don’t pander to me, kid -” He began to yell, but then he actually turned his head to look at Jim. Jim didn’t see the sadness that came into his eyes and the way his stature suddenly changed once he realized how young the other was. Just a kid, Leonard supposed he couldn’t be more than 17, 18 at the most. What he was doing on a shuttle to San Francisco was beyond him.

“The names Leonard. McCoy.”

“Jim Kirk.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you guys want more let me know

**Author's Note:**

> mhm


End file.
